We Made It
by adangeli
Summary: A series of connected episode tags beginning with Forever in a Day. Sam shows up on Jack's doorstep with a six pack of beer, a bottle of cheap wine and a package of chicken breasts. Jack's confused. They cook dinner.
1. Stir Fry and Crunchy Rice

_**Author's Note: So I was watching Forever In A Day tonight and this popped into my head and wouldn't go. I figured I'd share it since I bothered to write it down. :D**_

_**This doesn't have anything to do with anything I'm writing that you're currently (maybe) reading. But I've got grand ideas I'm not spilling about right now.**_

_**In other news, check out my FFN or AO3 profiles to get involved in the Sam/Jack Quarterly Claiming Challenge – a fic/art/vid prompt/challenge/request event. Can't find that certain fic you're looking for? Go ask somebody to write it. Giddy to try out your new photoshop program but aren't sure what to make? See what folks are asking for.**_

_**Oh, this is kinda **_**pre-ship**_**, if that's really a thing. **_

* * *

She shows up with a six-pack of beer, a bottle of cheap wine and a package of raw chicken breasts. Confused, he lets her in and she pushes past him to the kitchen like she's been in there since Daniel's wake. She hasn't. He still hasn't said anything other than her name, but she's pulling open the fridge and liberating questionable vegetables like a woman on a mission. And considering the raw chicken, maybe she is. He shrugs, bends around her to put the beer in the fridge and starts opening drawers to find the corkscrew.

He figures she'll talk when she's ready. And he's not one to turn down the promise of food – especially considering he was previously trying to decide between Hungry Man Barbeque and Hungry Man Meatloaf. But when she throws onion, yellow squash, mushrooms, and broccoli all in a pan together with no oil or seasonings, the chicken still wrapped in cellophane and apparently forgotten, he figures the two of them are going to need him to step in at some point. Clearly, Carter doesn't cook. He finds that amusing. And endearing. But damned if he's going to actually say that.

He bumps her aside with his hip and turns the heat off under the pan. He sort-of-carefully separates the vegetables on the counter then puts the pan back on the stove. Within minutes, he's cut the chicken into thin strips and has oil heating for a quick stir-fry. He silently hands her a box of minute rice and she blushes.

She puts almost the right amount of water into a bowl she finds in the third cupboard she tries with a little too much rice, shoves the whole thing into the microwave and sets it for twice as long as she needs to. Finally, he realizes something's wrong. He presses a glass of her wine into her hand and points her by the shoulders towards a stool in the corner. Armed with a wooden spoon and no clue he prompts her, "Not that I don't love a good dinner ambush, but what's going on?"

"What do you do when you don't know if you can do it anymore?" she asks and then drains half her glass.

"Do what?" he asks carefully and dumps the onions into the hot oil.

"It," she gestures widely, "anything. All the…shit we do."

"Three and a half years, Carter, and I've never heard you so carefully _not_ say something."

"One of our teammates _killed_ the wife of another teammate. How the hell do we come back from that?"

"Teal'c did what he had to do." He adds the broccoli.

"I know that."

He knocks the veggies around in the pan with his wooden spoon and idly notices she hasn't called him _sir_ even one time. He's gotta admit it… He's impressed.

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is, I've never felt like this before."

"Like what?" He pokes at a spear of broccoli, determines it's done enough, and dumps the chicken, the squash and the mushroom all in together along with a splash of sesame oil he finds hiding in his cupboard. While she thinks, he unearths some soy sauce and garlic powder and figures it won't be great, but it'll be more edible than whatever she'd had in mind when she showed up with raw chicken.

"I don't know," she finally says. "But I don't like it.

"Get used to it."

"That's your advice?" she asks and gets up to refill her glass.

She grabs a can of beer out of the fridge and waves it at him but he rejects it and pours himself a glass of the _really shitty_, he thinks after a sip, wine she's drinking. "Carter, this wine sucks."

She grimaces as if she's just noticed. "Yeah, it's pretty bad." But she takes another sip anyway.

"Sometimes you just do the best you can," he says and pulls her over-done and slightly crunchy rice out of the microwave.

"Do you think Daniel's okay?"

"He will be."

"What do you think he's going to do?"

"How the hell should I know? I've never lost the woman I love."

"You're divorced," she points out unnecessarily.

"It's not the same. When Sara and I split, it's because it was the right thing to do."

"So you didn't love her anymore?"

"Not the same way," he says and scoops crunchy rice and half-assed stir-fry into a couple of bowls before gesturing towards the dining room.

He puts a bowl down in front of the chair she chooses and she pokes listlessly at the veggies with one tine of her fork. "I don't think I've ever loved anyone the way Daniel loved Sha're."

"Not Hanson?"

She shrugs. "I don't know. How do you know if you love somebody enough?"

"Enough's relative."

"I just keep trying to picture what it would have felt like if I'd lost my dad the way Daniel lost Sha're."

"It's not the same."

"Have you lost a parent?"

"Yeah."

"Well, me too."

"I know," he says.

"And it was awful."

"It's not the same," he insists. "We love people in different ways. Losing a parent is different than losing a child is different than losing your soul mate."

"Was it harder losing Ch—"

"Yes," he interjects in a way he hopes she'll understand that now she's supposed to drop it. He likes her. He enjoys her company and watching her six more closely than he needs to. He might even enjoy making her smile a little too much. But he's not gonna talk to her about his son.

She finally takes a bite of the food he's been plowing through mindlessly. "I completely screwed up the rice."

"It's a good thing you've got a day job," he agrees.

"Why are you even eating this?"

He shrugs. "Because we made it."

She looks at him like maybe what he's saying is profound so he rushes to continue. "And because it's still better than a TV dinner. Besides, I bet I don't end up overeating." He winks at her.

She ducks her head and smiles a little, but she picks out the veggies and the meat and leaves the rice in her bowl.

"I'm sorry for ambushing you tonight."

"Did you get what you came for?"

"I don't know what I came for," she says.

"Well, you gonna show up for work tomorrow?"

"Yes, sir," she says.

"Then the rest doesn't really matter, does it?"

When she leaves it's like she's sucked the air out of the place. Her beer's still in the fridge – six pack broken but untouched. The wine bottle has half a glass left that he dumps down the sink. Their bowls are identifiable by the quantity of rice left behind – all of hers, none of his.

In her absence he starts to understand what she was asking, maybe gets what she was feeling, feels a little bad for not peeling back some of his protective layers. She's young and brilliant and, whether he never noticed it before or not, a little fragile in strange ways. _Big blue eyes_ ways. _Get him into a whole heap of trouble if he isn't careful_ ways.

Anyway, the next time he's at the grocery store he finds himself picking up bottle of decent wine. Just in case.


	2. Macaroni and Cheese

_**Author's Note: So this is happening, apparently. It's another "Sam shows up with food… sort of," story. This one comes right after Jolinar's Memories/The Devil You Know.**_

_**There are literally five other things I'm supposed to be writing right now – three of them for a grade – but this idea isn't leaving me alone. Apparently rewatching Stargate is good for getting the creative juices flowing.**_

* * *

He's not really surprised when she shows up after the very next mission. Daniel lost his wife, then she almost lost her father, they were all tortured with memories of their worst moments, so she hands him a brick of Colby with a sheepish look and he ushers her through to the kitchen.

He pours her a glass of the wine he bought – a red blend in a kitschy bottle he'll never admit to having tried the first time of his own volition – and then regards the block of cheese dubiously. At least last time she'd brought meat. In the end he hands her the cheese along with a nub of sharp cheddar and a hunk of Parmesan from the back corner of his freezer, a cheese grater and a bowl.

He's got water on to boil before she speaks. "I'm going away with Dad for a couple of days."

"Good." He rummages through his pantry and finds pasta and breadcrumbs.

"I guess," she says and peels the plastic away from the cheddar.

"You don't sound very excited to spend some time with your dad. Whose life we just saved, at great peril to our own, by the way."

"The blood of Sokar made me remember things I wish I hadn't."

He salts the water. "Yeah. Me too."

"I thought I'd dealt with all the Jolinar memories," she finishes the cheddar and knocks her knuckle against the shredder. She hisses, examines it, determines she's uninjured and reaches for the Colby.

He can't leave it though, and dumps the pasta and breadcrumbs onto the counter before nudging the cheese and utensil out of her hands. He holds her right hand in both of his and examines her fingers too closely for a nonexistent injury. But he just watched as she was hauled off several times and tortured for information so he's giving himself a pass. She sits quietly and lets him run the pads of his fingers over her knuckles like it's okay. With her left hand she sips his better wine.

"I wouldn't have though Jolinar's memories were all bad," he says in an attempt to keep things from getting too heavy, but his voice isn't as light as he'd hoped it would be.

"Not all of them were," she concedes. "Doesn't mean I was comfortable seeing them. But I was talking about my own memories. And maybe a little about the shock of some of hers."

He finally drops her hand and turns back to the stove where the water's finally showing signs of life in the form of tiny bubbles clinging to the sides of the pot. He sticks the end of his index finger into the water and pulls it back quickly. Not boiling, but definitely hot.

Behind him, she says, "I can't believe I'd forgotten what it felt like to find out about my mom."

"You didn't forget," he says but finds he can't look at her. "You learned to deal with it. And you can't go through life feeling that pain, that strongly every day."

"Or you might go on a suicide mission through the Stargate?" she supplies and sounds like she's kicking herself by the end of the sentence.

He turns and looks her in the eye. "Yes."

She blushes and then pays closer attention to cheese shredding than he thinks he's ever seen. He watches while she shreds a lot more cheese than they're going to need and then takes the Colby out of her hand and replaces it with the Parm. She just keeps shredding.

At his back he feels the water start to boil so he dumps the pasta in then pulls out another saucepan. He's finished the roux before she speaks again.

"If things had happened even a little bit differently, I wouldn't have joined the Air Force."

"Would you bring me the milk?" he asks when he's not sure how to respond.

She puts a half-gallon in his hand and he finds it's already opened. He pours in what looks like a right amount and hands it back.

"Carter, if you hadn't joined the Air Force, we'd probably all be dead."

"That's a lot of pressure to put on one person."

"You're a superhero," he says with a shrug. "Deal with it."

"I don't want to be a superhero," she says and then hands him the bowl of cheese. "I want to be fourteen and I want to finish those cookies. And maybe grow up to be an astronaut who gets to travel through the Stargate to other planets in a galaxy where there aren't any Goa'uld."

"It's a nice story," he says and slowly stirs his sauce until it's smooth and creamy. He mixes in a dash of hot sauce for good measure and then turns the heat down to low underneath it until the pasta's done.

She stands aside and watches him drain the pasta, add the cheese sauce, pour the mixture into a casserole dish, top it all with breadcrumbs he mixed with a little olive oil, and then slide it all into the oven. When he's done, she hands him a glass of wine and follows him into the living room. They sit; he notices she's brought the bottle.

They haven't even started talking yet by the time they both need a refill. He pours so she talks. "I've never baked cookies since that day."

"Not for nothing, Carter, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing."

"I always really liked baking," she says sadly.

"You're not exactly long on time these days," he says in what he hopes is a helpful way.

"I've got nothing _but_ time," she says.

And he thinks he sort of understands. Because when he's not in the mountain, not on a mission, he's got nothing but time, too.

She doesn't say much after that, and he's not sure how to not be an asshole when it comes to figuring out what's going on in a woman's head – especially when he can't use sex to coax out whatever it she's feeling. He's always been a lot better with his hands than he is with his words and that extends to every part of his life. He finds himself in the weird limbo where he wants to do things with her that he _can't_ do with her, but she keeps looking at him like she's just a woman and he's just a man and he knows she's not even doing it on purpose.

When he can smell their dinner he knows it's done and he shepherds her into the dining room where she takes the seat she took the first time – the one he usually sits in, coincidentally. A few moments later he brings her a steaming plate of macaroni and cheese and watches as she carefully separates the elbows from one another so they'll cool more quickly.

"It's good that you're going away with your dad," he says, bringing them full circle in forty minutes.

"I guess so. I don't really know what to say to him."

"He's your dad. You don't have to say anything to him. Just spend some time with him."

"What if he asks about Martouf?"

"He won't." Jack knows he won't because Jack wouldn't if she didn't keep bringing him up. Jacob didn't want to hear about _feelings _any more than Jack did – though for entirely different reasons if he had to guess.

She twirls her wineglass in by the stem and he watches the red liquid swirl around. When he'd bought the wine he hadn't just ingested a trippy Goa'uld brew, but he finds he's not too bothered by the comparison. Either way, he's thinking things he shouldn't be thinking but still resisting saying them.

She takes a bite. "Wow. This is really good."

"It's macaroni and cheese, Carter. Not magic."

"I eat a lot of yogurt and popcorn, sir. This is _really_ good."

They've switched back to the _sir_ portion of the evening so he finally feels like he's back on solid ground. He still has no idea why she appeared on his doorstep. Not really, anyway. But, like last time, she seems to have found what she was looking for without much help from him.

Either way, he finds himself hunting for interesting additions to his pantry next time he's at the grocery store – surprising ingredients and another good bottle of wine.


	3. Spaghetti and Meatballs

_**Author's Note: Post A Hundred Days. How could this **_**not** _**be angsty?**_

* * *

She stands on his front stoop for so long he finally breaks in on her train of thought by pulling the door open and waving her inside.

"You look like hell, Carter."

Her chin wobbles and she takes a deep, steadying breath before thrusting a plate of handmade meatballs and jar of spaghetti sauce at him and shouldering by. She doesn't go to the kitchen. She makes for the bathroom. He curses and closes the door.

He's poured the wine and put the meatballs in the oven by the time she reappears.

"I, uh… I'm sorry," he says.

"No, you're right. I haven't been sleeping."

"You've been sitting up nights learning to make meatballs?" he guesses.

She shoots him a caustic look. "My next door neighbor made them. Apparently I looked pathetic enough to warrant a meal delivery."

"Don't people usually bring food that's already…I dunno…cooked?" Anyway, now that she's mentioned it, she does look kind of pathetic – in that sweet stray sort of way. He should have noticed how head shy she's become, the dark circles under her eyes, the way she looks like a stiff wind or stiff drink would put her down.

He doesn't know what to tell her. He doesn't know know how to make it right. Between the emotional gamut he ran on Edora and the covert mission he's just been tapped for, there's little he can say.

_Hey, Carter, I don't know what it is we're doing here, but I can't pretend you don't make eyes at me sometimes and I can't pretend I don't try to make you smile at me all the time; because I settled for a woman on another planet and actually started to have feelings for her. Oh, and while we're at it, this is probably the last time you're ever going to show up at my place for something non-work related because I'm about to treat you like the asshole I've always tried to prove I'm really not. Wanna hit the mattresses just in case we've really got a spark so we can enjoy it before I screw it up?_

He figures he's probably a presumptuous ass. Whatever she's doing is kid-stuff; maybe a little harmless flirting with a safe CO, nothing serious, just a little fun and ego bump. Hell, maybe Carter just likes a little illicit thrill. Maybe she's just another in a long line taken by good looks and the Eagle on his shoulder. Anyway, he's not stupid. He'd seen the kicked-puppy look on her face when he'd walked away from her. So yeah, she's probably working on a _bit_ of a crush. But, he is too, so it's not like he can fault her for it.

Sure, that could be it. But that's not really Carter's style. She's not frivolous. And she really does look like hell. That doesn't seem very not-serious. Hell, maybe it's just his ego talking and whatever it is that's eating her doesn't have anything to do with his careless dismissal of her ability to re-plot the future of physics.

"They tell me you invented something while I was gone."

"A particle accelerator. Yes."

"That sounds…fancy."

"Not fancy. Just difficult."

"You know, I…uh…I didn't thank you for—"

"Can you not?" she exhales the words like she'd been holding her breath too long. In a way, maybe she had.

"Carter?"

"It never occurred to me that you didn't need to come home, you know? And I get it – you came to terms with a new life, and you met someone and started over. But we worked _really_ hard to bring you back and you just walked away from me…" she trails off uncomfortably as if she's said too much. "You walked away from _us," _she tries again, "like we'd just ruined your schedule. It's not about _thank you_, Colonel, it's about being god damned grateful that there are some people here who thought enough of you to…" she stops and turns away from him, shoulders heaving.

He waits for the smell of ground beef and spices to permeate the air, to give him something to pull her focus to, but it's too early yet.

She slugs back the glass of wine he poured for her and then takes off for the front door.

"Damn it," he chases after her, "Carter!"

He catches up to her next to her car. "You came here to talk, right?" She won't meet his eyes, but she nods. "Okay. So talk. Yell. Do whatever you have to do."

She laughs mirthlessly. "I don't _have_ to do any of it. Because tomorrow, the sun will come up over the SGC and you'll still be the Colonel and I'll still be the Major and none of this is going to matter. It _doesn't matter_, anything I say here tonight."

As much as he hates to admit it, she's right. Especially knowing what's coming. In a few days' time, he's going to turn her world upside-down with the theft of ally technology and it won't matter if he takes steps tonight to repair their relationship or not. Because she's going to push him after all that happens, and he's going to have to hurt her. But as advantageous as it may be, he can't make himself go out of his way to hurt her tonight. Not when she's obviously already hurting so badly.

He reaches out, fingers the ends of her hair, she ducks away. "C'mon," he says, "we'll eat dinner and you can just be mad at me."

"I am mad," she says but follows him up his front walk. "And I'm glad you're back."

"Whether you believe me or not, I am too."

"What about Laira?" she says as she settles onto the stool in the kitchen.

He tenses at the sound of the other woman's name. He spent every day with her for more than three months and he feels her absence sharply, especially in the space he'd fantasized about bringing her to; more, knowing that if he'd met her on Earth she's exactly the kind of woman who would have turned his head. She was kind and caring, more than a little attractive, strong and respectable. He had started to feel towards her the way he had, at one point, felt about his wife. Not the same strong feelings that led him to marriage, but at least the ones that got him to those strong feelings in the first place. Hell, for all he really knows, she's pregnant and he's missing another chance to be a father. But thinking down that road isn't going to do any of them any favors, least of all him.

He puts water on to boil and pours the sauce into a pot with some spices before he answers. "I guess it's not really important anymore, is it?"

"I got the impression you two had gotten…close."

"We had," he says with finality she respects.

He'd had an uncomfortable conversation with the base CMO about alien STDs, too, but there's no need to tell her that. After that was another uncomfortable conversation about how close, exactly, he'd gotten to his second-in-command. Being that he could still answer the Carter question honestly, said second-in-command didn't need to know about that either. These little dinners of theirs, while not _entirely_ against the rules, were private. Not secret. At least not right now. Not for a while if he gets that uncomfortable kind of lucky where she's heartsick over his dalliance with Laira. Especially not after how personally she's going to take the events of the next however long it takes to flush out the bad guys.

"You would have stayed," she says and he wonders if it's sadness, resignation or the death of something that tinges her voice.

"I might not have had a choice."

"Didn't it occur to you that we'd come by ship if we couldn't recover the gate?"

"Either way I was in for an extended vacation. Which part pissed you off? That I prepared to stay or that I didn't immediately jump through the gate to come home?"

"I don't know," she says hotly.

"Well, that's not helpful at all!" Then he realizes he's shouting at her and crushing a box of spaghetti in his hands. She doesn't look very sure in her anger. He thinks he probably doesn't either.

"Can't I make a salad or something?" she asks in the same angry voice.

He spins around and starts rooting through the fridge. He's shoved a cucumber, a bell pepper, a carrot and a bunch of radishes into her hands when he starts to chuckle. It's been a lot of years since he's fought with a woman over something he doesn't understand. Even so, he remembers incongruous statements thrown into heated discussion and it feels so damn familiar it hurts in the good places.

"What?" she huffs at him and then starts laughing too.

They're quiet while she makes little salads in his soup bowls and he makes the pasta and fiddles with the seasonings in the sauce. She pours him another glass of wine when he finishes his and somewhere along the way they swap glasses but he doesn't say anything.

He likes the way they move around his kitchen together. She's useless with anything that requires heat and he finds that surprising, incongruous, and a little convenient, but he really likes that she's not fucking perfect at every damn thing. She stands her ground when he brushes close, turns her hips to give him space but doesn't move her feet. Mostly he likes the way she doesn't flinch away when his wrist brushes against her waist.

She sits in his chair again, he puts a plate down in front of her, she pushes meatballs around in the sauce, and he doesn't give her too hard a time about pretending to eat.

"Thanks," he says, when she slides a hunk of cooked tomato off the tines of her fork onto his plate. He knows the texture makes her shiver.

She smiles.

"No, Sam. Thanks. For figuring out how to get me home."

She smiles again, ducks her head and blushes. "You're welcome."

Damn it. Damn it, shit and sonuvabitch. He wants to say something to her, anything to let her know that the things he's about to say and do aren't really him and that they have nothing to do with her. He wants her to blush when she looks at him and he wants her to do it with that smile, the one with a hint of her tongue behind her teeth. He wants to tell her he'd pour her another glass of wine if things were different. But he can't tell her that and he certainly can't do it.

To be safe he doesn't say anything. He doesn't offer her a bowl of the salted caramel ice cream he'd bought with her in mind. When she leaves he tries not to smile too softly, tries in the small ways he can to ease the transition.

The next day at the grocery store he doesn't buy the wine she likes because she won't be showing up for dinner any time soon.


	4. French Silk Pie

Samantha Carter would do things for chocolate that Jack tries not to think about. Standing on her porch in the pouring rain with a French Silk pie in his hands is a good time to remind himself of that policy. It takes him a good three minutes to work up the courage to ring her doorbell and in that time he realizes: one, that she hasn't said a solitary word to him that wasn't work related since he'd stolen the Tollan technology; two, that it's nearing too damn late to be knocking on a woman's door unless your only intention is to take her to bed; and three, that if he looks through the frosted glass of her front door he can see her standing at the end of the long hall between her kitchen and the door, staring at him standing in the dim light on her porch with a pie plate in his hand.

She turns and wanders off and he figures he's busted enough _and_ he has chocolate, so he lets himself into her home. He's surprised by the classical music that plays – something electric and…violin…but traditional, and it seems strange and wrong and sets his skin prickling but it's also familiar and comfortable in a way that settles his stomach.

He finds her in the kitchen, leaning against her counter. She's in pajamas but he really can't get past the big, fluffy socks on her feet to fully appreciate the way her breasts really are just perfectly fucking round even without a bra, and okay…so maybe he can appreciate both.

"I brought pie," he says and thrusts it in her direction like he's a twelve year old boy giving flowers to a girl for the first time.

"I see that," she says and feigns disinterest as she peers at the whipped cream topping.

"It's French Silk," he cajoles.

She shrugs but grabs a spoon out of the cutlery drawer on her way past him into the living room.

They sit on the floor, he holds the pie between them balanced on one hand and she digs her spoon right into the center. The sound she makes in the back of her throat when the chocolate hits her tongue is going to fuel the daydreams he shouldn't be having for far longer than he's even willing to admit to himself. It's good chocolate. He should know. He made the pie.

She takes another bite, licks the chocolate out of the bowl of the spoon, then hands him the utensil. He takes it, he uses it; he feels unworthy as his tongue curls around the metal that was just in her mouth.

She swipes at the whipped cream with a finger when he retains the spoon for another bite and he tries not to focus on the way that finger disappears between her lips. Going rogue, even undercover, messes with his balance, his good sense and his libido and he knows from past experience it can take weeks to find his equilibrium. He wishes a little for the old days when he had a wife or the wherewithal to hire a professional because it seemed a lot easier to fuck his way to equipoise than it seems to watch Samantha Carter eat chocolate and pretend he wouldn't throw both their careers away if she even started to say she wanted him just a little bit the way he wants her. He knows part of the way he wants her is wrapped up in the flood of testosterone but he knows most of it isn't and it's that _most of_ part that's scaring the ever loving shit out of him.

These meals they share started out as her looking for something and quickly became doorways into the parts of himself that he wishes he had more control over. She sticks her finger into the chocolate custard and he wonders if he really _just_ wants to fuck her because the blue of her eyes make him remember a conversation over a fancy candlelit dinner that ended a year later in "I do."

But he doesn't love Samantha Carter. If he did, he reasons, he wouldn't have hurt her the way he hurt her and they wouldn't be sitting on her living room floor eating French Silk pie while she still doesn't talk to him. No, it's gotta be the testosterone, the loneliness, the fact that he hasn't been laid since Laira and if he's being honest, Edoran women were a hell of a lot less participatory than he'd grown to appreciate in the almost thirty years he's been having sex.

She shifts and pulls one of her knees up in front of her, wraps her arms around a leg covered in stretchy grey material and cocks her head to the side. "Not that the pie isn't good, but…what are you doing here?"

He stalls for time and takes another bite of the pie. She liberates the spoon from his hands and he's both sad and a little grateful to not have to watch her eat more of it with her fingers.

"I figure I owe you an apology, Carter."

"So it's French Silk apology pie?"

"It's _you deserve to kick my ass but please don't_ French Silk pie."

She laughs a little. "You apologized," she says with a shrug, "and you were undercover."

"Then why are you not talking to me?"

She sobers and concentrates on the pie. They've eaten a little hole out of the center of it and he tries not to think of the pie as a metaphor and mostly fails. "Have you ever heard the saying that there's a lot of truth in a joke? Maybe there's truth in the things we say when we've got something to hide behind, too."

"Carter," he starts, but she cuts him off.

"You said you haven't been yourself since you met me." She takes a bite and passes him the spoon. "So, I guess I want to know, which part isn't you? Any of it? Or just the stuff that's just between us?"

He wonders if she's talking about just their professional interactions or if it's whatever these little dinners have become she's worried about. Either way he's lied to her, before the mission, during it, or after – there's no winning and he's not sure which loss is the best.

They work together. They do it well. It's important that she trust him. Their feelings, whatever they may actually be, are ether and they're disallowed. It would be easy to preserve the part of all of this that they're allowed to have, to maintain the professional relationship that he absolutely can't jeopardize. He can walk this whole thing back out of the danger zone she doesn't even know they've entered.

He can sacrifice whatever it is they're building here for the greater good.

He can.

"You and me," he confirms. And he's trying to figure out how to tell her that really, it's all about the two of them anyway because they're the ones who have a whole quire of paper that dictates how they're supposed to relate to one another and he doesn't actually follow a single damn rule.

The color drains from her face. She stands up and backs away from him. "So, you came here to apologize," she reminds him flatly.

He puts the pie on her coffee table. "I did. I am."

She crosses her arms over her chest and raises an eyebrow at him and he wonders idly if girls learn that look for credit because Sara used to give him the same one and it usually preceded his spending the night on the couch.

"Okay," she says dully, "you apologized."

He's been in the military long enough to know when he's been dismissed. She follows him to the front door, presumably so she can lock it behind him. He tries not to notice how her eyes shine wetly when he turns to her before he goes. He stops with the threshold between them, "It's not a bad thing, Sam. You gave me someone to be nice to."

He watches as her shoulders unburden just a little. "Thank you, sir."

"I know this isn't okay yet," he says and hopes she realizes that he means the part of the sentence he can't speak, _but it will be; I'll make it be_.

"Well, I've got a whole weekend and French Silk pie to work it out," she say and spares him a half grin.

When she closes the door, she turns off the light in the hall and he loses sight of her right away. Usually he's wondering if she got what she came for and now he understands when she says she's not sure. He came for one thing, discovered something else, and is leaving just grateful that he'll have an opportunity to keep trying fit her. In his truck his grocery list is on a post-it note stuck to the dash. He scribbles out the question mark he'd penned after the word _Wine_ and hopes for the best.


End file.
